I haven't seen anyone else pose this question to the OP, so I will: what gives you the right to decide to change all their computers, throwing out all their software investment in the bargain? Have you thought about asking, I dunno, maybe the teachers what they would most like to teach with? Perhaps asking the principal or school board what should be done with their property? Maybe even asking the parents what they want their children to be taught?
Obviously, Slashdot is raging full of declarations of what those 250 students should be made to learn, and the environment in which to learn it, but I have this curious affinity to parental involvement. Parents might have a very different view on what the key educational requirements are for this lab.
In my experience (teacher, teacher spouse, son of two administrators), the single biggest educational necessity for 4-12yr-olds is to learn to read well. There are a ton of great programs for Win9x to do that (the Living Book series is fantastic for young children). The Thinking Things series fits marvelously into any general-purpose critical thinking curriculum. There are thousands of MECC titles out there for Win9x available absolutely free to school districts.
Although I'm no MS fan (typing this on a PowerBook), there is nothing wrong with Win9x for school labs. It runs the applications fine. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of "bungie parents" who snap into a school, suddenly affect an interest in the network setup, decide to redesign everything in their own image, then get bored as the reality of non-technology-focused schools sets in, and bounce out again, leaving nothing but chaos in their wake. What happens 98% of the time is that someone pulls out the old Win9x install CD's and puts things back to the way they were, which while sub-optimal, is easily maintained by the 3rd-grade English teacher during her planning period, and is good enough to get all the machines booted into Mavis Beacon.
If you really believe that this school needs a retrofit, take your concerns and proposals to the School Advisory Council, or Parent Advisor Board, or whatever the local equivalent, and sell your pitch to the faculty and parents -- the ones who will have to change their procedures around, and live with the results of, your proposition. Also, don't be so quick to pass judgements on "what's worth $$" -- it's the school's budget, maybe give them a chance to weigh in on how they feel the money should be best spent. If you can convince them of legitimate savings, they may well thank you for it.
Isn't the target consumer group of Apple Designers, Artists and ppl like that? These are the Pros who are buying professional products like Powerbooks.
There's a lot of myth there. Sure, there are a lot of art & media types who love Macs, but it's overgeneralizing to call them "the" core audience. They're just a somewhat loud and exhibitionist niche, like "Hollywood liberals" who give the impression that all Democrats must think a certain way. There are a lot of other "professional" Mac users who are engineers, IT workers, teachers, preachers, and executives -- and I'm just going from first-hand friends off the top of my head. The new MacBook (I for one love the name) will work fine for them.
Also, don't forget the Mac's original market: "the computer for the rest of us." It makes a wonderfully simple environment for doing email, uploading photos, listening to music...heck, even reading Slashdot:-) Those aren't just iMac uses: lots of users are ditching the idea of a desktop in favor of a lightweight wireless with-you-anywhere solution. MacBooks aren't just for professionals, they're for anyone who prefers their cellphone to a landline.
Sure, this first MacBook came with the "Pro" appelation, but that was just so they could wrap their first Intel laptop in their prettiest aluminum case with their sharpest display. This entire model was designed for "cool splash" appeal, not serious graphic work. The "real" Pro versions will come as speed-bumps over the course of the next year, while the first iBook-level "MacBooks" will probably offer specs similar to this first so-called "Pro" model.
For myself, I have absolutely no concern about application performance, because I'm confident that:
Pretty much every app of any significance builds with either GCC 4.0 or Intel's compiler, both of which run just dandy on the new chips.
Most of the apps I use already have excellent versions already built and running on Linux and/or Windows, atop Intel chips. If anything, it was the Mac/PPC port that complicated code maintenance. By taking the PPC version out of the mix, most application developers will, if anything, be able to concentrate on producing even faster / better code by only needing to worry about a single architecture. (And yeah, I have been responsible for porting/maintaining apps across architectures, so I know somewhat of which I speak:-)
written on a beat-up 1st ed Ti, waiting eagerly for my 1st ed Pro
Are you suggesting that a standard configuration for a laptop should support the needs of people backpacking through the Congo? I think that's rather what "peripherals" and "expansion" are for, so that niche users can add what they need without adding cost to "standard" users (whom, somehow, I see more commonly connected to a boardroom projector or reclining on a city park bench:-)
Yeah, and to all you losers who were still on the fence about buying MSFT in 1990...don't! All that growth from the 80's has already been factored into the share price...they're all bubble in '91! Just ignore those 8 splits which over-optimistic analysts are predicting through 2006 -- this stock has seen it's day, I'm telling ya!:-)
(Caveat: most of what the parent said was true in general...but is it true in particular? The question underlying any speculative investment is, "is this one of the few stocks that will blow the curve?" Well, ask yourself: is Apple just "any other company"? Would you be reading this thread if it were?)
Weirdly, Apple is moving forward to current/future technology (ethernet & WiFi), rather than yesterday's. After all, there are so many people who'd plunk down $2,500 for premium hardware, then accept lowband data rates.
Who'd have expected this from the company to ditch floppy drives in '99?
The SEC already mandates that publicly traded firms retain all company emails for at least 2 years
TFA is wrong. The SEC mandates that dealer-brokers retain emails -- not "all publicly traded firms." The rule applies to those who do the trading, not to those being traded.
You do realize ebola has only ever killed, like, 800 people?
I didn't realize that. A little Googling suggested more like 1200, but you're right: that's pretty small compared to the all the consternation caused by The Hot Zone and Outbreak.
Still, I see that Ebola was only "discovered" (in the Western sense of "now we have a Latin name for it") around 1976. So this could well be a Lovecraftian "buried mystery" whose revelation will rise up from the murky primordial depths and slay us all...
...or not. But I'm glad for the vaccine progress all the same:-) (Noting, too, that progress at combatting any virus is a valuable advance in human knowledge, helping to forestall the return of real killers like the 1918 flu...)
"Sun never seemed terribly interested in the product...it's somewhat unclear why they were ever interested. When Sun started work on Java just after this point, Solaris OpenStep was never seen again. OPENSTEP became NeXT's primary OS from 1995 on, and was used mainly on the Intel platform."
Wikipedia
(I owned a NeXTstation, and I'm aware what processor it had.)
Seems to me, complexity itself isn't the problem. All modern operating systems are complex, and have to be in order to handle all the different network protocols, user interfaces, I/O devices, background processes, etc. The issue is how that complexity is managed.
One thing that I've always admired about Apple is that (like Google) they seem to have a corporate culture which heavily encourages new features to be integrated ELEGANTLY into existing frameworks. They really seem to spend time, thought, money, and even passion on finding a "clean" way to do things.
My impression of Microsoft has been rather the opposite: when they've decided to add a new feature, just add a new "required" desktop item; toss it in the Start menu; add a fifteenth tab to the Options dialog; create a bazillionth DOS8CHAR.DLL in the Windows directory; and you're done! The corporate culture seems to encourage slap-dash engineering of a form that would be frankly chucked out at Apple, Google, and other "cultured" companies.
...this new search engine does not help people looking for legal content, because that stuff was already easy to find
Yeah, Coward here's right. I've always found Google similarly useless, because legal information was already easy to find: you just go to http://foo.com/path/to/query?page=123456.
Hey, that's cool. I confess, I'd stupidly assumed that Google's "filetype:" parameter would only accept those same "enum" values as the SELECT box on their Advanced Search page. I had no idea it supported arbitrary extentions. Neat. Thanks!
You're right. I should tell future employers "my previous company lost its funding and went bankrupt because of its steller management, outstanding product line, and unimpeachable support services."
Or maybe I should boost my Slashdot karma by recommending other readers buy products that I secretly know to be flawed, but conceal that information behind a pleasant smile. If so, may I commend you to a reasonably-priced and rigorously secured operating system?
Basically a robust plastic drop-proof word processor running NewtonOS, with built-in IRDA wireless uplink. Ran for 24hrs on AA batteries. Horrendously overpriced (got ours free through a school, natch), but quite visionary and functional. I often wish I still had it.
I also worked for a company (well, several) that made these:
Our products pretty much sucked (sorry), but there were a number of s'okay competitors in the market. Rather than search for portable "word-processor", you probably want to look for "email/web appliance". It's a rich market, and there are some decent deals out there for $100.
I've always had a problem with this "nobody will ever buy anything ever again" slippery slope.
Look, how often do you buy things from spam email? How often do you click on flashing banner ads? Not very often, I'm guessing.
But guess what? Those content producers keep on producing, because a sufficient threshold of consumers DO buy something. They keep it up because it works, marginally.
You're forgetting that most potential television viewers never watch these shows in the first place -- they're at work, or at school, or working on their car, or whatever. The whole system doesn't collapse if a few people don't watch the show. Rather, the system is predicated on that very assumption.
Think too about software. How long have people been pirating Microsoft programs? Everybody using their unique MS-verified XP serial number, now? Right. And MS has lost so much money on the deal that they're closing their doors and not producing (well, spewing) any more versions, right?
All that's happening in the media world is that the viewing audience has gone from maybe (making these up) 1.31% of potential viewers to 1.27%. No biggie. They can take that into account, especially as international syndication is taking off like never before (Ballywood, anime, Cannes, etc).
I think you're generalizing from the "Slashdot/BT" audience. You think that because a number of techies download stuff, that'll undermine the entire market. You're stretching -- the people reading this thread are neither so populous nor influential.
The vast majority of prospective consumers will continue to get their wares the legit way, because that's what most people do. 7-11 hasn't gone out of business because of a few robberies -- nor even because some people found it was cheaper to drink from the tap. Their market is bigger than you.
I've got a related noob question: what are some recommended open-source drawing packages? I know that GIMP more-or-less occupies the Photoshop niche, but what do people endorse as compelling alternatives to Illustrator?
Honestly, the last drawing program that I really liked and found fast and intuitive was MacDraw II, and it's neither still around nor exported to SVG:-)
The Adobe SVG viewer requires Windows admin privs to install. That alone blocks its utility to large swaths of corporate users.
Why is it that Mozilla can write an installer that adds a whole browser under I.T.'s nose, yet Adobe can't manage a simple plug-in?
Re:Useful port replication: share PC peripherals
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 2
Whoops...apparently what I should have said was "a MacMini is better with a KVM switch", like this. That would have been less typing. Live & learn:-)
Useful port replication: share PC peripherals
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
What I would find useful (read: actually convince me to buy a MacMini) would be a port-replicator switch box that let me share a single keyboard, mouse, and monitor between the MacMini and an existing PC tower.
The MacMini is an incredibly cute and inviting little accessory, and I'd love to set one atop my desk. However, like most potential Mac converts, my desk surface is already dominated by a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, all connected to the ubiquitous Wintel desktop (or, alright, Linux if you prefer.)
Nobody is simply going to discard, or even unhook, their existing PC system simply to "try out" a MacMini as an alternative platform. Since two of the MacMini's chief selling points are:
size
PC-standard ports
...wouldn't it make just phenomenal sense to be able to share your existing peripherals during your Mac "test drive"?
Indeed, many home desktops are "shared" workspaces, and it may well be that between the husband, the wife, and the kids, some users decide to "switch" sooner than others. For compatibility reasons, it may never be an option to "permanently" unhook the PC. For all these reasons and more, I think the MacMini is a nifty idea, held back by the absence of the one critical peripheral it needs to thrive: an A/B switching port replicator.
(If one of these already exists with support for one-switch flipping of at least two USB devices and one VGA monitor, lemme know and I'll gladly recant and buy me a Mini:-)
(2) government programers are going to be about 10 times more efficient thatn contractor programers
Wow...wow. I've been both a government programmer and a contract programmer for 12 years, and I can say that that is perhaps one of the most erroneous statements I've ever seen.
I have to question the results a bit. Look at the archive for November 2004, especially around Nov 3rd. Anyone remember any "buzz" about Ohio? Maybe a Florida 2000 reprisal? "Battleground States," anyone? That was a hugely geographic news event, and it doesn't even register on their chart. Likewise, Sumatra barely merits a blip on Dec 26. I'm not sure I'm buying this.
What we have here is one computer algorithm aggregating another computer algorithm's assessment of "newsworthy," with no provision for hindsight or fluff-vs-historical weighting. It's a neat idea, and the graphics are pretty slick, but I don't see any real value here.
I am really getting tired of reading posts that assume that one student's experience with one professor in one American college automatically applies to every American university.
Do they teach what "generalization" means in other countries?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, Slashdot is raging full of declarations of what those 250 students should be made to learn, and the environment in which to learn it, but I have this curious affinity to parental involvement. Parents might have a very different view on what the key educational requirements are for this lab.
In my experience (teacher, teacher spouse, son of two administrators), the single biggest educational necessity for 4-12yr-olds is to learn to read well. There are a ton of great programs for Win9x to do that (the Living Book series is fantastic for young children). The Thinking Things series fits marvelously into any general-purpose critical thinking curriculum. There are thousands of MECC titles out there for Win9x available absolutely free to school districts.
Although I'm no MS fan (typing this on a PowerBook), there is nothing wrong with Win9x for school labs. It runs the applications fine. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of "bungie parents" who snap into a school, suddenly affect an interest in the network setup, decide to redesign everything in their own image, then get bored as the reality of non-technology-focused schools sets in, and bounce out again, leaving nothing but chaos in their wake. What happens 98% of the time is that someone pulls out the old Win9x install CD's and puts things back to the way they were, which while sub-optimal, is easily maintained by the 3rd-grade English teacher during her planning period, and is good enough to get all the machines booted into Mavis Beacon.
If you really believe that this school needs a retrofit, take your concerns and proposals to the School Advisory Council, or Parent Advisor Board, or whatever the local equivalent, and sell your pitch to the faculty and parents -- the ones who will have to change their procedures around, and live with the results of, your proposition. Also, don't be so quick to pass judgements on "what's worth $$" -- it's the school's budget, maybe give them a chance to weigh in on how they feel the money should be best spent. If you can convince them of legitimate savings, they may well thank you for it.
Also, don't forget the Mac's original market: "the computer for the rest of us." It makes a wonderfully simple environment for doing email, uploading photos, listening to music...heck, even reading Slashdot :-) Those aren't just iMac uses: lots of users are ditching the idea of a desktop in favor of a lightweight wireless with-you-anywhere solution. MacBooks aren't just for professionals, they're for anyone who prefers their cellphone to a landline.
Sure, this first MacBook came with the "Pro" appelation, but that was just so they could wrap their first Intel laptop in their prettiest aluminum case with their sharpest display. This entire model was designed for "cool splash" appeal, not serious graphic work. The "real" Pro versions will come as speed-bumps over the course of the next year, while the first iBook-level "MacBooks" will probably offer specs similar to this first so-called "Pro" model.
For myself, I have absolutely no concern about application performance, because I'm confident that:
written on a beat-up 1st ed Ti, waiting eagerly for my 1st ed Pro
Are you suggesting that a standard configuration for a laptop should support the needs of people backpacking through the Congo? I think that's rather what "peripherals" and "expansion" are for, so that niche users can add what they need without adding cost to "standard" users (whom, somehow, I see more commonly connected to a boardroom projector or reclining on a city park bench :-)
(Caveat: most of what the parent said was true in general...but is it true in particular? The question underlying any speculative investment is, "is this one of the few stocks that will blow the curve?" Well, ask yourself: is Apple just "any other company"? Would you be reading this thread if it were?)
Weirdly, Apple is moving forward to current/future technology (ethernet & WiFi), rather than yesterday's. After all, there are so many people who'd plunk down $2,500 for premium hardware, then accept lowband data rates. Who'd have expected this from the company to ditch floppy drives in '99?
Still, I see that Ebola was only "discovered" (in the Western sense of "now we have a Latin name for it") around 1976. So this could well be a Lovecraftian "buried mystery" whose revelation will rise up from the murky primordial depths and slay us all...
It was only a secret from the clueless. MacOS X is OpenSTEP with eye-candy. OpenSTEP is an Intel-based operating system; always has been. "Duh."
One thing that I've always admired about Apple is that (like Google) they seem to have a corporate culture which heavily encourages new features to be integrated ELEGANTLY into existing frameworks. They really seem to spend time, thought, money, and even passion on finding a "clean" way to do things.
My impression of Microsoft has been rather the opposite: when they've decided to add a new feature, just add a new "required" desktop item; toss it in the Start menu; add a fifteenth tab to the Options dialog; create a bazillionth DOS8CHAR.DLL in the Windows directory; and you're done! The corporate culture seems to encourage slap-dash engineering of a form that would be frankly chucked out at Apple, Google, and other "cultured" companies.
Legal users never need search engines. Duh!
Hey, that's cool. I confess, I'd stupidly assumed that Google's "filetype:" parameter would only accept those same "enum" values as the SELECT box on their Advanced Search page. I had no idea it supported arbitrary extentions. Neat. Thanks!
Or maybe I should boost my Slashdot karma by recommending other readers buy products that I secretly know to be flawed, but conceal that information behind a pleasant smile. If so, may I commend you to a reasonably-priced and rigorously secured operating system?
Apple eMate
Basically a robust plastic drop-proof word processor running NewtonOS, with built-in IRDA wireless uplink. Ran for 24hrs on AA batteries. Horrendously overpriced (got ours free through a school, natch), but quite visionary and functional. I often wish I still had it.
I also worked for a company (well, several) that made these:
VTech Postbox Express and Companion
Our products pretty much sucked (sorry), but there were a number of s'okay competitors in the market. Rather than search for portable "word-processor", you probably want to look for "email/web appliance". It's a rich market, and there are some decent deals out there for $100.
Look, how often do you buy things from spam email? How often do you click on flashing banner ads? Not very often, I'm guessing.
But guess what? Those content producers keep on producing, because a sufficient threshold of consumers DO buy something. They keep it up because it works, marginally.
You're forgetting that most potential television viewers never watch these shows in the first place -- they're at work, or at school, or working on their car, or whatever. The whole system doesn't collapse if a few people don't watch the show. Rather, the system is predicated on that very assumption.
Think too about software. How long have people been pirating Microsoft programs? Everybody using their unique MS-verified XP serial number, now? Right. And MS has lost so much money on the deal that they're closing their doors and not producing (well, spewing) any more versions, right?
All that's happening in the media world is that the viewing audience has gone from maybe (making these up) 1.31% of potential viewers to 1.27%. No biggie. They can take that into account, especially as international syndication is taking off like never before (Ballywood, anime, Cannes, etc).
I think you're generalizing from the "Slashdot/BT" audience. You think that because a number of techies download stuff, that'll undermine the entire market. You're stretching -- the people reading this thread are neither so populous nor influential.
The vast majority of prospective consumers will continue to get their wares the legit way, because that's what most people do. 7-11 hasn't gone out of business because of a few robberies -- nor even because some people found it was cheaper to drink from the tap. Their market is bigger than you.
nm...answered below. I should RTFT first :-)
Honestly, the last drawing program that I really liked and found fast and intuitive was MacDraw II, and it's neither still around nor exported to SVG :-)
Why is it that Mozilla can write an installer that adds a whole browser under I.T.'s nose, yet Adobe can't manage a simple plug-in?
Whoops...apparently what I should have said was "a MacMini is better with a KVM switch", like this. That would have been less typing. Live & learn :-)
The MacMini is an incredibly cute and inviting little accessory, and I'd love to set one atop my desk. However, like most potential Mac converts, my desk surface is already dominated by a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, all connected to the ubiquitous Wintel desktop (or, alright, Linux if you prefer.)
Nobody is simply going to discard, or even unhook, their existing PC system simply to "try out" a MacMini as an alternative platform. Since two of the MacMini's chief selling points are:
Indeed, many home desktops are "shared" workspaces, and it may well be that between the husband, the wife, and the kids, some users decide to "switch" sooner than others. For compatibility reasons, it may never be an option to "permanently" unhook the PC. For all these reasons and more, I think the MacMini is a nifty idea, held back by the absence of the one critical peripheral it needs to thrive: an A/B switching port replicator.
(If one of these already exists with support for one-switch flipping of at least two USB devices and one VGA monitor, lemme know and I'll gladly recant and buy me a Mini :-)
Yeah, it sounds like one hand clapping.
What we have here is one computer algorithm aggregating another computer algorithm's assessment of "newsworthy," with no provision for hindsight or fluff-vs-historical weighting. It's a neat idea, and the graphics are pretty slick, but I don't see any real value here.
Do they teach what "generalization" means in other countries?
I have a chocolate hat I'll sell you for half-price.